By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus

I can’t emphasize enough how satisfying it is to see Timothy Geithner finally leave government. True, it would have been more enjoyable to see him leave in handcuffs, but I take my satisfaction where I can get it.

The unfortunate part about high level government officials who are utter failures leaving government is that when they leave, journalists still fawn over them. Timmy got plenty of interviews from major media outlets but the longest, and thus most nauseating, came from the Wall Street Journal. Reading it is like watching a horror movie where everyone knows what’s about to happen to the character and are trying to warn him/her through the screen. Except in this horror movie I’m throwing my hands in the air and saying “that lie was debunked years ago!” I don’t have the patience to go through each and every lie told in this interview, but I’d like to hit on the major ones.

Crisis as “Exogenous Shock”

To repeat a theme on Naked Capitalism, this crisis wasn’t, and most crisis aren’t, are exogenous shocks. They come from variables endogenous (internal) to the system at hand. It’s easy however, for policymakers to frame their responses to crises as responses to external trauma. First, it removes the agency of important players from within the private sector and the public sector. Second, it portrays whatever society is experiencing as inevitable, like sand castles washing away in the beach. Tim “I’ve never been a regulator ” Geithner evokes this blatantly false conception here:

Of course, in a severe crisis — the once in a century event, or hopefully it’s a once-in-a-century event — then the system will inevitably come under much, much more pressure. And even the strongest firms come under pressure then. And in that context, our successors are going to have to do exceptional things again if they want to protect the economy from a failing financial system. That’s inevitable.

After all, every century or so humans just happen to be giving out “liar’s loans”, pushing them on unsuspecting investors around the world, and then because they couldn’t find enough real economy risky borrowers, they had to use credit default swaps to create synthetics versions of them, and they did all that so big that they blew up the casino. Don’t you remember the liar loan and derivative trading scandal of 1908, 1808, 1708, 1608 etc? It’s just natural, so please look away.

This is what criminals and deviants tell themselves about their behavior. They just can’t “help” it and it will happen inevitably. In reality, the financial system is a social institution and its malfunctioning is the result of purposeful human action, not the law of gravity. Individual people and institutions were central to setting the stage and developing this crisis to maturity. The entire U.S. regulatory community and large swaths of are banking system were involved. Those loans don’t just pour out like an overfilled cup. Someone chooses to make them. Someone chooses to lie to a borrower until he buys the con. Real people defended this decrepit behavior and real professionals were pushed out of their jobs for not being slimy and criminal enough.

Incidentally, if you know a flood happens once every century, why wouldn’t you spend your time PREPARING for it? What, is this a Ricardian equivalence thing where any attempt to prepare for floods just makes the flood worse? With the exception of the rotting American state, most places prepare for flood season.

In reality, the financial system is a social institution and its malfunctioning is the result of purposeful human action, not the law of gravity.

“The enforcement response… is still unfolding”

This is an incredible one. According to Geithner, it’s not that bankers haven’t gone to jail, it’s that they haven’t gone to jail yet. In the fantasy world Geithner is selling to the public, all the bankers that deserve jail are going to be put in jail… at some future date. See the full quote below:

MR. WESSEL: And other side is, there were repeated accusations about not enough of them were punished to pay for what they did. You never were comfortable with that.

MR. GEITHNER: No, I felt from the beginning and I think this was always a great strength of our system that you had to have an overwhelmingly strong, powerful, credible enforcement response for the rules that they had to live with. And two things happened. One is that the enforcement response, which is still unfolding, took a lot of time to get traction because these things are very complicated. And the public saw a long lag. And of course, the other thing is that a huge part of what happened across the system was just a mixture of ignorance and greed, or hope over experience, and not illegal. Most financial crises are not caused by fraud or abuse. They’re caused by people taking on risks they don’t understand, too much risk. when the tide turns, it can have catastrophic damage.

When exactly are these “enforcement actions” supposed to take effect? The statute of limitations is running out. In addition, the cases the SEC and Department of Justice have pursued they’ve been quick to settle without an admission of guilt and with liability waivers. The most infamous was the much-ballyhooed mortgage settlement in early 2012, which amounted to a few billion dollars in cash, “billions more” in “writedowns” on various mortgage debts of questionable meaning. Perhaps they will pass a special law allowing convictions well past the statute of limitations, as long as the subject is already dead.

Suddenly though, Geithner jumps into a completely different lie that contradicts the lie he was just telling. How can the investigations into criminal behavior be “complicated”, have “a long lag” while he’s completely sure that “a huge part of what happened… was not illegal”? Put aside the fact that we have piles of evidence that contradicts that drivel. It doesn’t even internally make sense to that paragraph. It’s like detectives showing up to a crime scene, taking one glance at the dead body and going “this is going to be a long investigation but I can say right now the subject wasn’t murdered”.

“We were worried”

Geithner then goes on to muddy the waters about his role in the boom. He says things like“My colleagues and I at the Fed….were worried about the risks you saw building up across the system”. He does know that we have meeting transcripts right now that show as late as 2007 he was playing down concerns about the mortgage market and financial institutions like Bear sterns. Yet we’re supposed to believe that in 2004 he and the rest of the Fed were fighting to rein in risk taking but didn’t have the regulatory authority (which is clearly a lie)? Even if they did believe this, why weren’t they in front of Congress asking for more regulatory powers? This is all rather damning whichever way you look at it.

Goodbye Timmy, or so I can Dream

Good riddance. Unfortunately Geithner’s history as a complete and utter failure will probably guarantee him a place as “wise sage” for decades to come. I can at least hope to see and hear of him much less. I must confess to not having the stomach to unpack all the lies and the depth of them in this interview nor the other hagiographies floating around. Feel free to do so in the comments! There are still plenty of juicy lies in there just waiting to be untangled. He even begs for a history lesson about Mexico in 1995, which I may provide in another post.

Somehow I think Jack Lew won’t live up to Timmy’s vileness. But perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

(Though Geithner seems to have a Magic Armor — the guy evades taxes and then feeds confidential Fed information to private banks — anyone else would have been doing hard time and paying millions in penalties!)

“And of course, the other thing is that a huge part of what happened across the system was just a mixture of ignorance and greed, or hope over experience, and not illegal.”

For Christ’s sake! How many times do we have to hear this same line trotted by senior officials before it becomes blatantly obvious that this is a criminal conspiracy to cover the tracks of some well-connected fuckwads? We can hope all we want, but the writing is on the wall. Mary Jo, nor the big O, are going to do a damn thing when it comes to getting tough with the revolving-door establishment. This is all about running out the clock for as long as they can get away with it.

Folks can we please not forget the scorn that needs to be heaped upon his Manchurian Candidate boss who appointed him in the first place.
The font of lies emanating from that man’s mouth is enough to make me lose my breakfast. Black Bush, worse in many cases. Who else to continue America’s centerpiece war crime, the drone program. Warrantless wiretapping and spying that would make the Soviets and East Germans green with envy. Criminal bank cartel drug financier rackets explicitly protected by the White House. A health care plan only a big pharma or insurance fat cat could love. All of it sold to the sheeple by our Basketballer-in-Chief. Revolting.

I have to think that the “ignorance and greed” issue covers many things that happened and probably are happening. The idea that these folks were all smart crooks, proves you have not met many crooks, smart is usually not a feature.

No, the crooks you know about are stupid, that’s why they got caught. The smart ones remain unknown, anonymous, or are able to convince, or are part of a larger conspiracy or system that convinces, rubes that there was no crime or that they weren’t involved.

So think about a bubble like a game of telephone– the message is information about the quality of an asset, here “liar loans,” the start of the line is the borrower and the subprime lender, the end of the line is the single mother with a mutual fund and $1000 grand to invest in Idaho. There were liars, cheats and criminals along the way, yes– those kids who deliberately distort the signal to make the game “fun,” often at the cost of the innocent next in line who passed on “Jenny’s got a poop butt” without thinking about it too hard. Most of the people involved in the game of telephone are innocent, some of them are completely ignorant, and only a few of them need to be liars for the whole game to break down. That’s what Tim meant when he said the majority of the activity in the bubble wasn’t illegal.

oh, but ye good citizen, “look forward”…never back where all crime is committed and investigated.

Turbo, that would be right under your nose, at the New York Fed, where your job description is has the head-regulator of Wall Street.
We all should be astounded that anyone believing that the route to financial stability is leaving elite frauds in charge of many of our banks. Listening to Giethner one finds it’s just hard to believe that any human brain – even the most ideologically self-deluded – is capable of making these kinds of statements all the while hiding from themself from the oozing irony.

Reading this is like getting a root canal. I know it will hurt and I will be outraged, but the injustice just galls me.

Turbo Timmy – “One is that the enforcement response, which is still unfolding, took a lot of time to get traction because these things are very complicated”

So’s the US tax code, but ….oh, that’s right, Timmy couldn’t do his taxes correctly. Anyway, it is NOT complicated. Bankers, credit rating agencies, FIRE economy people corrupted the political apparatus to prevent any legal accountability. They did this to enrich themselves by manipulating bonuses and stock options et al. Bankers than have people appointed who have gone through bankers camp (Federal Reserve) that prove that they have drunk gallons of the kool aid.

“The latest wave of credit market innovations has elicited some concerns about their implications for the stability of the financial system, concerns similar to those associated with earlier periods of rapid change in financial markets. Will the most recent credit market innovations amplify credit cycles, contributing to “excessive” lending in times of relative stability, and then magnify the contraction in credit that follows? Will they introduce greater volatility in financial markets? Will they create greater risk of systemic financial crisis?

By spreading risk more broadly, providing opportunities to manage and hedge risk, and making it possible to trade and price credit risk, credit market innovation should help make markets both more efficient and more resilient. They should help make markets better able to allocate capital to its highest return and better able to absorb stress. Broad, deep and well-functioning capital markets complemented by strong, well-capitalized banks, able to provide liquidity in times of strain, make for a more efficient financial system: one which contributes to better economic growth outcomes over time”

The striking thing about Geithner and his cronies such as Steve Rattner is the absolute impunity with which they operate, vastly exceeding the worst of the Gilded Ages Robber Barons. Part of this owes to the complete support and effusive backing of President Obama; and behind him the corporate and financial potentates who run this country.

We’ve not seen the worst of this. Tens of milllions of people are exposed to desolate circumstances and millions more join them every year. Rather than reform itself, the current order led by gansters in pinstripes will inevitably turn to the Final Solution phase of a collapsing economy they engineered.

It was very powerful, but I have to warn you that it’s like peering into the abyss of hell as I imagine it. That such a delusional twit could have had such a powerful effect on a large fraction of the country is horrendously frightening. And she came so very close to the levers of power! Imagine if she had been able to have even half of her “word salad” be coherent. We live in a strange, interesting, but very frightening time.

I think Geithner is a non-charismatic version of the “Sarah Palin” creature, and with a lot less of the “word salad” trait. Like Sarah, though, he’s a delusional twit. What’s really got me depressed is that I don’t think they have any sense that they may be wrong: they appear to have unbridled certainty. To be delusional, charismatic, and be able to speak somewhat coherently — and have complete certainty is the ultimate social horror.

So far, we’ve been pretty lucky in our time as compared to the period of 1875 to 1932; but the rhyming of history tendency is nagging at me.

Tim was raised a failure, practiced failure, and was promoted for his failures.

Since the crisis started Tim has been fearless in his lies and head fakes. He is the last guy out of the bank robbery, backing out the door to ensure the door gets locked behind him so the robbed can’t chase. Closing the barn door. Exit stage left. Drop the curtain. Magic.

Geithner is the ultimate text book example of the Peter Principle along with the Catch 22 addendum: To be found “unfit to head Treasury,” Geithner would need to have proven he’s “Unfit,” However, according to the Peter Principle to aspire to the role as Secretary of Treasury, Geithner had to rise/promoted to his level of incompetency. Thus, if he claimed he was unfit to head Treasury, he’d need to be evaluated. However, to be evaluated, he must request the evaluation: an act that is considered sufficient proof for being declared sane and cognizant of the gravity as understood through experience that is necessary to hold the position of Secretary of Treasury. Thus, the paradox of the Peter Principle with the Catch 22 contingency made it impossible for Geithner to be declared “unfit.” And finally, why he was the perfect choice to head Treasury.

Funny you mention exogenous shock. It seems this is also describes the Federal Reserve. They never anticipate, and then respond as if it is exactly that exogenous, which of course removes any prior responsibility

“The recognition that things that are not sustainable will eventually come to an end does not give us much of a guide to whether the transition will be calm or exciting.”
timmy’s a sadistic little dweeb

“In reality, the financial system is a social institution and its malfunctioning is the result of purposeful human action, not the law of gravity.”

Oh my. I want to have your babies. Well, that’s not possible, but I have some grand-daughters. Or perhaps I will stitch that sentence into a sampler. Mr. Tankus, I expect to be in Ottawa in the not-too-distant future, I will track you down and take you to lunch. Thank you for existing.

Suddenly though, Geithner jumps into a completely different lie that contradicts the lie he was just telling. How can the investigations into criminal behavior be “complicated”, have “a long lag” while he’s completely sure that “a huge part of what happened… was not illegal”?

That’s the beauty of truly profound bullshit! It’s truly and profoundly all made up bullshit with absolutely no regard for logic or reason whatsoever. Sure, anyone can just throw out half-baked lies and falsifiable assertions in the sure knowledge that they’ll be met with the skepticism and scorn such routine bullshit deserves, but the truly masterful bullshitter weaves a a trail of such utterly depraved, twisted, illogical, and self-contradictory bullshit that their listeners either throw up their hands in frustration at the insanity of it all, or realize that they are in the presence of a master bullshit artist who has transcended the mere routine craft of spreading bullshit, and who now occupies an exalted high place in the realm of esoteric mystic bullshit, which many bullshitters aspire to reach, but few – alas! – will ever attain. Nixon, W, and now Geithner, to name but just a few. Master bullshitters all!

Does anyone here think Foamy grasps that he worked 2 mutually-inconsistent lies into one sentence?

I actually believe that Foamy will be capable of causing a lot more (continuing) harm when he becomes “eminence grise” from some perch in the private/think-tank/bank sector. Not that his behavior while in office betrayed much self-restraint.

A word to the wise Nathan: Focus on the point, not the man. Geithner being “vile” or not is not worth talking about; his record in office is. Focus on the failures, but let the facts speak for themselves without rhetoric.

Good article Nathan. Well done. Having read Neil Barosky, the TARP Inspector General’s book “Bailout” it is very clear that in Timothy Geithner what the nation got as a Treasury Secretary was “Big Money Tim” Wall Steet’s inside government shill and bagman.

Yes, tax-cheat Timmy will retain his status as henhouse weasel along with other criminal architects of disaster capitalism like Summers, Rubin, Greenspan, et al, who keep reapjust as long as the chickens submit to kleptocracy . . . that is, indefinitely.

And no, lawyer-financier Jacob Lew, derivatives hawker at Citicorp, will hardly be better according to Bill Black:

“Lew is the real deal, another brick in Obama’s creation of Wall Street on the Potomac.”

Lew who presided over Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagal at OMB, does not does not believe deregulation caused the meltdown, probably because he was a personal beneficiary ($1M bonus) of the bailout of Citi. Worse, according to Black, “Lew’s embrace of long-falsified austerity dogmas is intense.”

This is surely the real reason for Lew’s elevation to chief henhouse fox at this time. Black: “…Obama chose Geithner, Lew, and Daley as his principal advisors on his effort to commit the “Grand Betrayal” in July 2011. Geithner is a Republican who changed his affiliation to “independent” as a fig leaf, so his embrace of austerity is understandable. Daley is a senior Pete Peterson ally. Peterson is a Republican billionaire Wall Street leader who is leading the effort to unravel the safety net.”

Jacob Lew’s embrace of austerity is almost certainly why the most effective evil, Obama, chose him at this critical time, in order to implement his nefarious Shock Doctrine betrayal. We can only hope that Jacob Lew is a less effective evil, but he’s no better than tax-cheat Timmy.

It is amazing that no one wants to blame the Manchurian candidate, a totally committed pee-on of the Wall Street for hiring this jerk to take the blame. He is above it all nowadays, in the clouds, for having been re-elected and the liberals are all excited about the good things to come, e.g., Jake Lew, Mary Jo White, etc. Wall Street has a deep bench folks and one needs to acknowledge it.

& Now, that Reid has voided the “Constitutional Option,” comes the DC Appeals Court in a mere conincidence to void all recess appointments. The Chief Judge, David Sentelle, a prodigy of Jesse Helms, was a mentor of Mitch McConnel. The Bummer now has a perfect alibi.

I can only think of one word……”Weasel”
“A sneaky, treacherous person”…..
“Weasel Word”…..
“An equivocal word used to lessen the force of a statement or evade a direct commitment”
“Weasel Out”…..
“To back out of a situation or commitment in a sneaky or cowardly way”
(Webster’s 2 New Riverside University Dictionary)

Mr. Geithner is just another horrid example of the continuing rot of the American state….along with the complete militarization of our economy, police, education, media, etc.

Nobody, but nobody that has any sense of the direction of our financial system the past 50 or so odd years could have expected anything different after the last two disastrous presidencies….especially after seeing the “financial advisors” that the Obama admin was bringing in with them.
(This is to take nothing away from the previous presidencies and their propensity to deregulate, deregulate, deregulate, globalize, globalize, globalize….consequently contributing to the crushing of the long fought for middle class.)

The sad part is the the most sought after word in the lexicon of finance (large or small, formal or informal) is:
TRUST
That has been completely destroyed.
Without “trust” you have nothing.
It’s people like Timothey Geithner (and too many others) who have destroyed that which makes the flows of capital, the “handshakes” of individuals to try to build a deceent economy, in the end worth nothing.

Anybody in this country who at this present time “trusts” this economy to re-build itself so as to re-enforce the rebuilding of a middle class has to have a screw loose.

Fraud is rampant; killing anyone in “our” way is rampant; “weasel” politics is rampant; the onset of an evil, totalitarian state has been seeded.

With reference to this article and the one in the Links about Larry Summers the moral is that if you don’t design your democratic political and governmental system on the basis of human nature being ambivalent, both self-enhancing and self-transcending, then as a nation of people you lay yourself wide open to government by sociopaths like Geithner and Summers.

Geithner should be seen as one of the great criminals of our times. His actions and policies both at the New York Fed and Treasury made most Americans poorer, cost the jobs of tens of millions or thrust them into lower paying McJobs, and resulted in millions losing their homes, all this so that an insolvent and highly predatory banking sector might steal and gamble its way back to solvency and that the rich and elites might increase their already dominant wealth and power relative to the rest of us even further.

The truth is that honest usury alone is unstable which is why periodic debt forgiveness was a feature of many ancient societies. But rather than solve the problem of usury, we made it worse by adding an unethical form of endogenous money creation – the goverment backed credit cartel – which charges usury for money (so-caled “credit”) created from thin-air and which DRIVES people into debt else they are priced out of the market by those who do borrow.

Yes, there was criminal behavior in this last boom but that behavior probably delayed the day of reckoning since, according to Professor Steve Keen, our money system REQUIRES accelerating debt just to keep it from crashing.

The truth is our money system itself is criminal and would be so even if run by perfect people.

Not sure if you and I would agree on all the details, but one thing we do agree on is that focusing mainly on illegalities is misplaced. The current system would hurt plenty of people even if nobody was breaking the law.

There’s a large cast of characters that have knowingly played starring and supportive roles in both financial frauds and political misdeeds. They have all functioned within a culture of corruption that has burgeoned to encompass nearly every elected representative as well as every appointed agency director. An acceptance of corruption and a certain adroitness at making it appear non-existent or insignificant, is now understood to be part of the unspoken job descriptions.

We have gotten to this state of crony capitalist criminality through both Republican and Democratic party complicity, but the vast majority of citizens still have no awareness of how they’ve been bamboozled and how our country is being raped.

Even well-intentioned veteran progressive writers remain loyal to the Dem Party, and because they are entranced by the trappings and rituals and rhetoric that are so cleverly crafted to look like a democratic process at work, they overlook the monstrous failings of their revered leaders.